Awaiting Public Project Summary

Bristol faces challenges typical of many cities; climate change, energy resilience, congestion, health and well being of a diverse, ageing population and the transition to a low carbon economy. What sets us apart from other cities is the richness of our public-private-people partnerships and we champion innovative approaches to tackling city issues through the smart deployment of ICT and digital connectivity. Connect Bristol will explore how to leverage existing investment and relationships, and create new ones, to produce a global showcase to open-up and integrate smart city systems. It will explore the implementation of a citywide, cloud-based partnership platform to aggregate, integrate and innovate; providing a mechanism to derive greater economic, social and environmental value from data currently embedded in separate organisational systems. It will anticipate the explosion of data that the Internet of Things and an increasingly dispersed energy production system will bring.

Political philosophy's primary focus is not how politics is organised right now, or how it has been organised in the past, but rather how it should be organised in the future. This gives our subject a fairly clear remit, but also a fairly substantial puzzle. What on earth could make our arguments in this heated area right or wrong, or at least better or worse? Clearly, as in all fields, considerations such as consistency, clarity, and comprehensiveness go a long way, but they cannot be the whole story. What we need to know is: What are the more specific forms of reasoning that would make our arguments in this domain more or less defensible? Or, put differently, precisely which methods of argument are best suited to supporting the sorts of conclusions we want to draw? With that question in mind, this project has two objectives. First: to establish the study of 'methods' in political philosophy. This will be pursued with our subject's first book on the topic, an under-contract monograph with Oxford University Press entitled Political Philosophy: Problems and Methods. Second: to increase engagement with our subject amongst the wider public, starting with the city of Bristol. This will be pursued by giving talks, at every secondary school in Bristol, on 'how to do political philosophy'. These talks will provide an exciting and accessible account of the forms of argument available to these students, as documented in the planned book. The benefits of this work are substantial and connected. In the first instance, it will improve the current academic situation, whereby we have various high profile 'methodological' debates, including 'ideal vs. nonideal theory' and 'moralism vs. realism', but no debates about particular 'methods', let alone a keystone text of the kind planned here. Instead, our current discussions are primarily a set of exchanges about the wider purposes of our subject, rather than a set of debates about the general forms of reasoning - from thought experiments to conceptual analysis - that enable us to pursue those purposes. As a result, we do not really know how many methods political philosophy has, what those methods are, what their merits might be, or how much they vary from methods found elsewhere - in political science, for example, or moral philosophy, or the daily arguments of 'real politics'. All these questions matter. By exploring them, this project will open up a new field of enquiry, help scholars with their current work, and also make our subject more accessible to the general public, given that our methods of argument need first to be clearly understood before they can be clearly explained. This last benefit illustrates the bridge between the two objectives, and it is worth emphasising here, given that, at present, political philosophy is unsure about how best to engage with the 'real world', whilst the real world is unsure even what political philosophy is, assuming it has heard of it at all. This uncertainty matters, because it shows how answering what might seem like rather dry 'methods' questions within our subject would have significant implications for our relationship with the world outside it. In other words, if we could do a better job of explaining what we do and how we do it, the relationship between academic scholarship and the general public could be transformed. Increased understanding of our subject would lead to increased accessibility, increased interest, and increased potential for non-philosophers to 'do' it themselves. Public philosophical engagements would become, not just more productive, but also more common, whether they take the form of policy papers, comment pieces, or even talks in schools of the kind proposed here. This project therefore studies methods not just for the sake of the study of methods, but also in order to change how our subject is done, and in turn how it is seen and accessed by others.

In October 1831 a wave of disturbances swept across England after the rejection of the Second Reform Bill in the House of Lords. These 'reform riots' began with serious disorder in the East Midlands (Derby, Nottingham) followed by unrest in towns in the West and Southwest. The wave culminated in Bristol with the most serious riot in nineteenth century Britain. Lasting three days, crowds destroyed several major institutions by fire and released prisoners from four jails. The riot was violently suppressed by military units with hundreds of people killed and wounded. Historical analysis of the Bristol riot has led to two principal narratives; the first characterises the event as the criminal actions of a mindless, irrational, drunken 'mob', and the second as a reform protest. However, neither of these accounts satisfactorily explains how the protest developed into collective violence on such a scale nor how the agenda of the rioters, reflected in their choice of targets, changed over three days. Equally, the spread of the 'reform riots' across the country remains largely unexplained. What were the relationships between these events and Bristol? The proposed research breaks new ground for historians in that it will be carried out using concepts and principles from social psychology, where social identity researchers have had success in explaining the limits of behaviour in rioting crowds; the role of authorities in the dynamics of such riots; and the process through which rioting spreads across different geographical locations. Sharing social identity allows a crowd to act as one and also specifies what counts as appropriate behaviour, through the notion of a group norm. Since social identities are based on relationships with other groups, when these relationships change so do social identities - including group norms and ability to take collective action. This social identity approach can therefore help explain the escalation of crowd events into conflict and the spread of disorder; why some groups join in with a wave of rioting but others do not. The social identity approach has not, hitherto, been applied to disturbances in the late-modern period (1750-1900), which is one aim of the present project. In addition, we will critically evaluate our research and analysis in order to create a user-friendly procedure for historians and others applying social identity concepts to analyse similar late-modern disturbances. The research involves collecting evidence about all of the reform related disturbances in October 1831 in order to produce triangulated accounts of each event. Of particular interest would be the actions of the crowds and the authorities. For example, how participants gained information about previous disturbances in the wave of unrest, why, how and where the crowd assembled, how leadership emerged and what targets were selected for action. Similarly, we are interested in how the authorities behaved, whether they were aware in advance of the event, how they reacted before and during the disturbance and what kind of coercion (if any) was used to deal with the disorder. The research will then focus on the mentalities and feelings of the participants. Of particular import will be sources of evidence that explicate the motivations of crowd members; how they reacted to information about reform protests; their perceptions of legitimacy; and how they understood themselves and their 'opposition' as social groups. The kinds of evidence required range from eye-witness accounts of what crowds were discussing, chanting or heckling, to memoirs, and visual and material sources such as hand-bills, posters and banners. Combining these two kinds of accounts and using social identity concepts analytically will help us understand how protests developed into collective violence and how they spread across cities, regions and the country, in a new framework that can be applied in the future to other waves of disturbances.

This project starts from a concern with the quality of social work thinking and assessment. Inquiry reports following high profile child death cases have repeatedly highlighted shortcomings in social workers' analytical and assessment skills and exercise of professional judgement. Recognition of these limitations highlights the need to explore what might help practitioners to 'think about their thinking'. Practitioners frequently encounter complex, emotionally charged and sometimes dangerous situations and these encounters provide the 'evidential base' on which decisions are made; so the nature and quality of information that practitioners draw from them is of vital importance. A number of writers have drawn attention to the connection between the nature and quality of thinking and the emotional content and context of childcare practice. Supervision provides a key forum in which thinking processes and practices can be explored, so has a critical role to play here in providing a safe space where practitioners can identify the emotional content of their experience and reflect on its meaning. Given the centrality of the supervision-practice feedback loop for sound practice it is important that staff providing supervision have the competence to do this to the highest standards. To support their work, they need accessible and reliable methods and resource materials that can be readily used in practice. The proposed project involves collaboration with one local authority to develop and trial a new approach, based on Cognitive Interviewing (CI), for use in supervision. CI is an approach that has been developed to promote the accuracy and completeness of eyewitness accounts of events. Initially devised for use with witnesses or victims of crime, it draws on psychological understandings of memory and recall, and uses a particular set of questioning techniques to improve retrieval of information from the memory of a witness or victim. It has been chosen as a starting point here as it offers a tested approach to support the collection of information. Working closely with social work practitioners in the partner organisation, the project team will adapt the CI framework for use in supervision, developing an approach - the Cognitive and Affective Supervisory Approach (CASA) - that homes in on cognitive understandings of practice but in so doing also heightens practitioners' awareness of the affective dimensions of practice and of their thinking. Dr Turney, the principal investigator (PI) and Professor Ruch, the co-investigator (Co-I), have extensive experience in both practice and research in relation to critical and analytical thinking in assessment and the role of emotion in practice, and of developing resource materials for practice. The partner organisation, a local authority in the South West of England, will work with the principal and co-investigator, providing staff time for the collaborative development of the CASA protocol and, after appropriate training, for its use in an agreed number of supervision sessions over an 8-month period. During this implementation phase, the PI and Co-I will provide monthly group consultation sessions for the supervisors, to allow them to reflect on the use of the CASA and the extent to which it assists the expression of both 'event' and 'emotion' information, and how this information has been used in supervision to inform case management. Data gathered through the course of the project will be reviewed to assess the usefulness and impact in/for practice of the CASA framework. Drawing on participants' feedback during and at the end of the implementation phase, the project team will revise the CASA materials as necessary. A range of outputs including an executive summary of project findings, model guidance and protocols, workshop template and curriculum guide will be developed collaboratively by the project team for use by academic and practice audiences and disseminated.